MT intersections paper accepted at PNAS

Our work with the Vershinin Lab on how cargos navigate 3D microtubule intersections has been accepted to appear in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America!

The basis of this paper is a set of in vitro experiments by my co-first author Jared and others in the Vershinin Lab in which they use holographic optical trapping to arrange two microtubules in specific 3D configurations (at outlined in Jared’s Scientific Reports paper). They then let cargos driven by multiple kinesins navigate these intersections and report the probabilities of passing along the original MT, or switching to the crossing one.

My contribution to the paper are a set of simulations (snapshots pictured above), in which I model the cargo as a 3D solid body with a number of kinesin motors attached. I generate a set of stochastic trajectories and investigate the mechanisms from which the switching probabilities arise.